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Welcome back to your regularly scheduled programming. Thank you for your patience as I got to spend some much needed holiday time with my wife and my 8-month-old son travelling around the U.S. instead of being glued to a computer screen (which is exactly where you'll find me currently).

Spending so much time with family, most of them non-technical, did give me an opportunity to explore what they knew about Bitcoin or if they'd even heard of it. And let me tell you, pretty much 100% of the people I talked to had at least heard about it, and some of even the most non-technical were quoting the price and asking if I thought they should get in. Seeing as the monetization of Bitcoin is mainly a collective action, I'm as bullish as ever*.

*Don't take this as investment advice, just sharing my own position.

Analysis

An epic 4 part series by Vijay Boyapati on his bullish case for Bitcoin, starting from first principles of Bitcoin's superior attributes as a Store of Value, comparing it to Gold and Fiat currencies. This series crystalizes and aggregates a lot of my own investment thoughts on Bitcoin, and brings together a lot of what has been written about Bitcoin as a Store of Value into one place. If you read one thing this week, make it this.

News

It's a Segwit party and everyone is invited! GDAX and Coinbase have started rolling out Segwit support (finally!) and Segwit usage continues to climb. As of this writing, almost 30% of transactions are using Segwit. Not to be outdone, Bitfinex has also announced Segwit support for Bitcoin deposits and withdrawals.

Speaking of Segwit, Bitcoin Core 0.16.0 has been released, bringing with it GUI support for Segwit (previously one could only use Segwit from the RPC interface). They've also switched on Replace-By-Fee by default for all sends through the GUI, which should hopefully help people avoid the stuck transaction problem.

Development

Andrew Poelstra has written up this very detailed introduction and exploration of Bulletproofs, an implementation of Confidential Transactions, and how it performs in space, speed, and size, compared to other CT implementations. For a higher level analysis for why CT is so important to Bitcoin, check out the recent post on Anonymous Bitcoin by @nopara73.

Videos

Education

Chris Coverdale has written up this great introduction to Public Key Cryptography and how it's used in Bitcoin. If you've ever wondered how it's possible that your Bitcoin address is okay to share widely, while your private key is not, definitely give this article a read. He even includes a really interesting analogy of the Discrete Log Problem using a billiards table which I haven't seen used before.

Russell O’Connor tackles the mind-bending claim that if you pick a random point in time, then you can expect the previous bitcoin block to be mined 10 minutes in the past, and the next bitcoin block to be mined 10 minutes in the future. 🤯

If you spend any time around Bitcoin, you'll for sure have run into people using the term "hash" or "hashing" pretty much constantly. Thankfully, Liberty York has written up a terrific explainer to get you caught up to speed on Bitcoin's underlying and crucial piece of tech. After you've finished that, I highly suggest checking out some of her other recent posts like this one on why Alpacas are Masters of Bitcoin 🤣